Honk🪿

this trans day of visibility, i want to highlight and celebrate intersex trans people.

society ignores intersex trans people and tries to erase this overlap. and also ignores complex intersex experiences around gender. society denies our intersexuality, or our transness, or both. even in queer circles we are often seen as "basically cis" or "basically trans" or "intersex aka own separate species that can have nothing in common with other queer people."

intersex trans people are often denied gender affirming care. intersex trans people get their bodily autonomy attacked both as intersex and trans. even in trans accepting circles like gender clinics, we often face ignorance and incompetence.

people feel entitled to know and question our anatomy, physiology, transition goals, identities — everything about us.

our bodies belong to us. our identities belong to us. our experiences belong to us.

we deserve bodily autonomy. we deserve representation. we deserve recognition. we deserve celebration. we deserve pride.

intersex trans people, i love you.

say it with me

not all people who were AFAB menstruate!

and

not all people who menstruate were AFAB!

"AFAB" refers to an event that is sometimes tied to biological characteristics but is not always tied to those biological characteristics. it is an event. it is an event! it is not a statement about biology! "AFAB" is not a kind of person or kind of body it is something that happens to you!

Nothing shows the long-term negative effect the Shinigami Eyes extension has had on the queer community better than the fact that now that's it's fallen apart I'm seeing people legit saying the reason it's bad now is because it "got taken over by TERFs" like bro...we really let this extension do SO MUCH heavy lifting that now a big chunk of the online queer community has no fucking idea what a TERF actually is or how to identify one.

Shinigami Eyes is still owned and maintained by trans people and there has not, to my knowledge, been some sort of covert TERF coup to wrench control away from the decent trans folks running it(TERFs don't need to do that to weaponize it, anyone can use it and it is not moderated well enough for false labels to get caught 100% of the time and there is no way to appeal a false label anyway). It's still trans people in charge. The problem is that trans people are not immune to being bigoted and welding whatever scrap of power they have in a space to target marginalized people they don't like. Which, tbh we probably should have seen coming given that for most of it's existence the rules have stated outright that several transmedicialist slurs attacking afab trans people are "out of scope".

Shinigami Eyes did not get taken over by TERFs, again, they don't need to be in charge to use it as a weapon. Unfortunately the people in charge just happen to hold some profoundly shitty views about several marginalized demographics and have responded to being called out for that by deciding intersex, nonbinary, and afab trans people are inherently transphobic and marking them as such.

We never should have relied on a crowdsourced blacklist that has been vulnerable to misuse from day one to catch transphobes for us. We need to know how to recognize TERFs, radfems, and other transphobes ourselves, because not being able to recognize them unless they're standing on a desk screaming about how much they want trans people to die is making it easy for their horrid bullshit to permeate our spaces and promote division and hatred.

Learn to spot TERFs, radfems, and transphobes yourself. Do not outsource your critical thinking to a person or group with power and no accountability. We have to be better than that.

Casual intersexism is the entries for "SAFAB" and "SAMAB" across all LGBTQI wikis reading as "self-assigned [fe/male] at birth" and intersex erasure is when it never mentions surgical, saying it is "a term is most often used by intersex people, however it is not exclusive to them" without mentioning WHY it's most often used by intersex individuals (both are exclusive and coined by intersex individuals FOR intersex individuals)

ID. The "society if" meme, showing a futuristic utopia, with the caption: Society if intersex folk were treated as actual human beings. End ID.

Intersexuality / Intersex variance

Intersexism

Helpful clarification, I keep seeing people use the word intersexism to refer to being intersex.

💛 some intersex posi~ colors based on the intersex & intergender flags. 💜

•••

[Image ID: Three small squares with thick, round dark gray text in the center. They are lined up horizontally and have a flat colored background. The left square is soft yellow and says “intersex bodies are natural.” The center square is light gray and says “intersex people deserve autonomy.” The right square is light purple and says “intersex voices are important.” /End ID]

I've been off of my low dose post menopausal testosterone for a month bc the only compounding pharmacy is too far away and I'm too busy and it's fascinating to watch all the health problems that went away on it creep back. It's such solid evidence that yeah, maybe more cis women need T and more cis men need E probably to actually live healthy functional lives but we're so binary and stupid about sex and gender that T is the Man Hormone and E is the Woman Hormone and there's a baseline for cis people??? Insanity. Insane. Absolutely insane.

Off of T, my joint pain is back, my blood pressure is up, I've gained weight, I'm volatile if I don't control myself, I'm constantly an emotional wreck, and I can barely get out of bed. It took me years to get them to let me try T, and they kept arguing that all of those things would get worse ON T. I fucking hate modern medical science modern sex and gender science too bc my queer clinic was shocked to hear all this. Genuinely. They don't get it despite being THE local hormone clinic for queer folks specifically. They don't understand intersex bodies or that maybe our baselines are bullshit on an individual basis. All of modern sex and gender science absolutely ignores the natural sex differences in most people.

How many people get put on the wrong hormone for their wellness? Cis or trans. Because we've assigned hormones to gender. How many cis women deal with worsening body pain and mental issues bc they were put on estrogen when they needed T? Why are we gendering fucking hormones

I've had a billion doctors say the same shit to me. Last time I got my presh checked in-office on T, it was 110/70. Literally as perfect as it can get.

I was misdiagnosed with PCOS, but I have CAH. My blood pressure was critically high for most of my life and I was always told to lose weight. When I say critically, I mean 160/120 nearly every single fucking time. Dangerous. BP meds helped get it to a safer high, and testosterone got it to low-perfect.

I want to strangle every single doctor who nearly killed me by ignoring that critical BP and blaming ME for it. Don't ever let doctors convince you that there's nothing at all they can do on their end. Or that hormones are specifically bad for you in one direction or the other. Estrogen has nearly killed me and since I'm a cis woman, estrogen is supposed to "be the right hormone" to "fix" me. It never was.

On the other end: I'm trans and I'm on Testosterone to accomplish my gender goals like a year ago. I also was diagnosed with fibromyalgia about 2.5-3 years ago and it's widely believed there's no treatment options to manage fibromyalgia aside from exercise and muscle relaxers... which is only given in worst case scenarios.

Since starting testosterone? My symptoms have alieviated- not entirely vanished- but I have more energy and control over my life and my pain is far more manageable than when I was initially diagnosed. I relied on a cane around the time of my diagnosis. Now, most days I don't need it since my symptoms have improved and allowed me to improve my health.

I don't think T is the magic cure-all for my disability but holy shit my quality of life has drastically improved.

As someone who had fibro suggested but then got diagnosed with EDS and also still have pain but it's like cut in half? Yeah. I legitimately thought I was on a downward decline to an early grave bc I was so dysfunctional from pain. Now it's manageable.

Also - is it fibro? Is it EDS? Will we ever know the truth? Probably not :)

I really want everyone to know that modern medical science is AWARE that testosterone is an effective treatment for fibromyalgia and other chronic pain conditions, and estrogen is not. This doesn't work for everyone and exactly how it works isn't quite settled science, but it's been known for like a decade. A LOT of doctors don't know this, because they're not up to date on the research, or are resistant to the idea because of perisexism/cissexism/prejudice against people with mixed sex characteristics in general/a misconception that giving a patient mixed sex characteristics is inherently harmful. BUT. Science, as a whole, knows! and more people should know!

Here's a fibromyalgia-specific review article that I think is well-written and has a non-technical summary of the main points. It should be open-access but let me know if you can't get at the full text.

White HD, Robinson TD. A novel use for testosterone to treat central sensitization of chronic pain in fibromyalgia patients. Int Immunopharmacol. 2015 Aug;27(2):244-8. doi: 10.1016/j.intimp.2015.05.020. Epub 2015 May 21. PMID: 26004314.

This article is TEN YEARS OLD. I'm printing this out and taking it to the gender clinic and stapling it to the nonbinary doctor's forehead that denied my intersex ass T gel because I identity as a woman and it would "make me gain weight and make my blood pressure go up." A nonbinary doctor told me this. A nonbinary doctor denied me fucking hormones that could have been helping me this whole time. A nonbinary doctor led the charge on forcing me to keep taking an antidepressant that was keeping me awake for days straight and making my kidneys hurt.

I'm so fucking mad. Not at the person providing this article - I'm pissed that I waited months on a waiting list to see this nonbinary doctor, hoping they'd be the change I needed, and in the end I had to hunt down a cis OBGYN with PCOS to medicate me properly. I'm sick of intersexism. I know three other local intersex people that this specific doctor has denied care to. Fuck.

Trans intersexism, y'all.

ASAB is so often used to neglect chronically ill people seeking a diagnosis. it hurts intersex and perisex people alike.

we need to get rid of the sex binary for so many reasons and disabled liberation is one of them.

lupus is a disorder with a ratio of 9:1 people who were AFAB to people who were AMAB. it is a disorder that is wildly dominated by people who were AFAB.

doctors often treat lupus as a "women's disease" and when they're not treating it as a "women's disease" they're treating it as an "AFAB disease." there is no room in the system for intersex people (no statistics on our prevalence in the lupus population) and no room for people who were AMAB (despite them being 10% of people with lupus) the biology of trans people, particularly those who have medically transitioned, is of course not taken into account.

this leads to neglect of people who were AMAB, intersex people, and trans people (particularly transfeminine but not exclusively) who have a dangerous, often life threatening autoimmune disease. doctors don't bother looking because "how could you have it? you don't fit this narrow presentation of lupus that I created in my head." people have died from this. lupus kills, especially when left untreated.

abolishing the sex binary would largely fix this problem.

the reason so many people who were AFAB have lupus is because of estradiol. (read more about why here) estradiol is a major determining factor in who develops lupus and who doesn't. it's the theorized reason for the sex disparity. .... but people who were AFAB aren't the only people with estrogen-dominant endocrine systems, and not all people who were AFAB have estrogen-dominant endocrine systems. you can develop lupus with a testosterone-dominant endocrine system but it is far less common.

so why do doctors look at ASAB instead of that actual cause, estradiol? (rhetorical question but the answer is transphobia and intersexism)

sex abolition says that in replacement of overarching categories of sex we instead identify individual traits. lupus is one example of thousands where focusing on a specific trait rather than a sex would actually be more helpful in narrowing down diagnoses.

intersex and trans people will continue to have their diagnoses missed until we abolish the sex binary and replace it with something more useful. there is no disabled liberation without intersex liberation.

reading comprehension questions:

Because this apparently needs to be said -

It is ok to be sexually attracted to intersex people.

It is not ok to go on about your sexual fantasies regarding intersex people on posts where intersex people are complaining about how sick they are of being constantly fetishized.

There is a time and a place for everything.

perisex people who know next to nothing about us making "intersex educational" content:

"intersex is a medical condition ......... it's a medical condition ....... they have a medical condition .... medical condition ....... not all intersex people are LGBTQIA because it's a medical condition .......... it's a medical condition"

Just to break this down for any confused people:

Yes, a lot of intersex people have unique medical issues and challenges that perisex people do not have.

No, "intersex" is not a medical condition. Intersex is a sociopolitical identity based on the collective experiences of many, many types of people with differing medical needs and challenges.

Yes, being intersex makes you queer. You can opt out of calling yourself queer, but queer is a sociopolitical identity heavy with specific meaning that will always apply to intersex people, whether an individual identifies themselves as queer or not.

Would it be correct to say that “intersex refers to a group of medical conditions that make an individual genotypically and/or phenotypically fall outside of the normative definitions of male and female” and that “falling outside the sexual binary causes intersex people to have many of the same experiences that are unique to them, which is the basis of forming the intersex sociopolitical identity.”

Because my understanding is that people are intersex because of something that is diagnosable. Like, you can’t take a scan of a gay person’s brain or body and say, “there, that’s the gay part,” but you can look at an intersex person’s karyotype and say, “this guy is XXY” or “this woman is phenotypically female but has XY chromosomes” or “this woman was genotypically and phenotypically female, but after puberty she started producing much more testosterone than the average woman.”

absolutely not. intersex variations are not medical conditions at all in the same way perisex sexes are not medical conditions

Currently wondering if a reason perisex trans people can be so resistant to learning about intersex experience and intersexism is because they've built up an elaborate fantasy in which having a biological basis for being different means you're Valid and will get The Care You Deserve

And they are so desperate for proof that somebody will be get these things and hence maybe they might get these things that to learn about Intersex Reality is like existentially threatening

Because the only way they can conceive of societal acceptance is though bioessentialism rather than grapple with the hard truth that biological difference means the social response will in all likelihood to be to even more violently try and eliminate transness by all means available

there's a strange amount of people on here who will just say "I think I'm intersex but every single test we've run has said I'm not, but I still think I am so I'm gonna keep using the label" and it's like. at a certain point it's ok to accept you were wrong, you know that, right? And of course doctors don't always make it easy to find out if you really do have an intersex variation or not, but sometimes you.. just don't. And that's fine. You can be an ally without being intersex yourself. It's ok, people won't be mad at you for exploring your identity (at least, anyone worth their shit won't be angry), especially if you use your experiences in the community to spread awareness and be a good ally to us.